Telstra, WhoTF is this?

I think our telecommunications supplier has some explaining to do in regards to this issue.

Now, I’m not overly concerned that my usage is being tracked internally by Telstra. A lot of this recording is for tracking abuse of their network, and for billing purposes. This is fine, I have no quarms with that.

However, the above linked article, which I initially heard about on the radio this morning, discusses a more sinester form of tracking.

Here, I have keyed in a special URL… observe the access logs:

www.longlandclan.yi.org 149.135.145.110 - - [27/Jun/2012:09:57:28 +1000] "GET /~stuartl/test.htm HTTP/1.1" 200 102
www.longlandclan.yi.org 50.56.58.47 - - [27/Jun/2012:09:57:28 +1000] "GET /~stuartl/test.htm HTTP/1.0" 200 102

Now, you’ll note there wasn’t one, but two hits. Why? One is clearly from the phone I’m using, as it so happens my phone is hiding behind 149.135.145.110, one of Telstra’s many Carrier NAT gateways (and shame on you Telstra for using carrier NAT).

Who’s this other one? Someone on Rackspace, a US hosting company. What business is my Internet traffic to this other party?

The saving grace for me, most of my traffic is to the APRS-IS network, with some HTTP traffic checking that my tracker has my location up-to-date and the odd query here and there. Maybe a gratuituous download of an ISO or system updates towards the end of the billing period. They’ll get pretty bored with my NextG usage, there’d be hardly anything of commercial value there.

Others however, may have more reason to feel violated. Telstra have some explaining to do.